A Manifesta on Money – A Guide to Unapologetic Pricing

TL;DR

I want to build extraordinary wealth so I can invest it back in community, in reparations, in shifting the balance of economic power, in paying employees thriving wages & profit sharing, in paying speakers and educators and ASL interpreters abundantly for their labor, in building new cultures and systems of collective care, pleasure, easefulness and joy.

 

The Manifesta

This topic has been a long time coming as I’ve been wrestling with money mindset matters for decades.

I wonder to myself, “Why is this something I see so many women and queer and trans and disabled and Black and Indigenous and People of color wrestle with?”

Then I remember, “Oh right, the system has been designed to keep all who are not cis, hetero, white, men, from accessing wealth.  Because who has money has power.”

Story time. 

Here and Now

The raw truth is that pricing services is challenging for many entrepreneurs.  Maaaaaaanny factors go into pricing such as business expenses, life expenses, my investment of time, emotional labor, energy, training, education, professional development, and lived experience.

As a queer, fat, gender-expansive, Autistic-ADHD entrepreneur, I embody a number of identities that have been historically and consistently underresourced and undercapitalized.  Still, I recognize the various advantages I also experience as a result of existing in a white body.

Equity, justice, and access are core values for me personally and for my business.  And I have come to understand that those values and charging sustainable fees that reflect the value of what I invest in my clients are not mutually exclusive.

The rEVOLution takes capital.

I’m not actually engaging in equitable money practices if I am under pricing my services resulting in my own ongoing financial struggle–this is just trading one struggling person for another.

I have also learned–over the decades of volunteering thousands of hours of community labor, mental health labor, and educational labor–that I do my best work with and for clients when I am being paid on par with the investment I make in how I show up for each client.

As an entrepreneur, I have made a number of financial investments in my business, the majority of that in receiving coaching from leaders, mentors, and seasoned business owners I respect and admire.  I make it a priority to invest in learning from Black women, gender expansive people, women, anti-oppression thought leaders, and anti-racist business coaches.

While some of the investments I have and am making stretch me out of my financial comfort zone, the return on investment I am recieving in every coaching call, every workbook exercise, every connection I make in those communities, every brainstorm over my copy, is exponentially higher in value than what I invested.

I have been inspired by the writings of Simone Grace Seol an ADHD coach, entrepreneur, and 7-figure business owner, who then directed me to the model of Wort + Cunning Apothecary sliding scale to offer multiple investment tiers to clients in an effort to honor and acknowledge the variations in financial priviledge, access, and class in which my clients live.

I offer the tiered pricing on group programs only.

I have huge dreams for the future of Expansive Expressions…you might even say they’re expansive 😉

I plan to have a financially prosperous business so I can hire neurodivergent and disabled employees paying them VERY well, with comprehensive benefits, and profit sharing.

I plan to bring Black, Indigenous, Autistic, ADHD, Disabled, Queer, Gender Expansive guest speakers, educators, and panelists paying them at the top – or more – of their range to honor their labor and investment.

I plan to partner with investors to generate start-up grants for new entrepreneurs who are neurodivergent and disabled.

I plan to co-create a model of business and organizational design that is actually inclusive, accessible, and anti-oppressive…and then I want to teach others how to apply that to their business.

I plan to build a life that is balanced, sustainable, and enjoyable.

It all takes capital.  A LOT of capital.

And I believe with every mitochondria within me that this vision is an absolutely worthy investment for me, and for you.

 

In the Beginning…

For me, roots of my broken relationship with money began in childhood being raised in an evangelical religious community.  The teachings I received about money were that it was a sin to desire money, it is righteous to give away money, and wanting money was evil.

Add into that mix that I was an unidentified Autistic-ADHD kid who was being raised and socialized as a girl.  This layers on a number of other factors such as: I took those religious lessons I learned from infancy literally.  I worked at following those teachings with my whole entire heart.  I was also raised to be hospitable that I have a role to welcome people, to feed them, care for them, make them feel at home in any setting I was in.  I took that role to heart as well.

I had big dreams of changing the world as a kid.  Like when I was 13 years old I filled a whole binder full of ideas about how to re-route kids from incarceration into therapeutic healing programs with animals because I thought they deserved to heal more than they deserved to be locked up.

The model I was shown, through the religious community and seeing my family members donate consistently to missionaries, is that you don’t need to worry about money because God’s got you covered.  If you have a vision for doing “the Lord’s work” all the resources will come to you, your community will provide for you, everything will come together.

Again, literal me taking all of this deeply to heart as how to move forward in life.

As an adult, I pursued jobs that were more about caring for people than making money.  Why do I need to care about making money if God’s got me covered for my big world-changing dreams?

Well…as I left my home and went out into the world in adulthood and was exposed to other ways of thinking and understanding the world, I began to shift my relationship with money.

It was a struggle though, being in community organizing and non-profit work there is so much scarcity.  Trudi Lebrón discusses this in her book, Anti-Racist Business Book when she coins and defines the term, “nonprofit mindset syndrome.”

I’ve also seen how collective scarcity can result in people judging others with a harshness for pricing their fees at a sustainable rate.   As if the scarcity teaches us that none of us should prosper while in reality, liberation teaches us that we all deserve to thrive, and that our collective liberation is tied up with each other.

“Nonprofit mindset syndrome is a set of beliefs that are perpetuated by nonprofits and public service organizations, including schools, libraries, and much of the human service sector, that trains professionals in these industries to accept the conditions of scarcity of resources”

-Trudi Lebrón

Out of Religion, Into Activism

I navigated new realms of being in service to other humans outside of the context of religion (because I eventually broke up with religion when I became clear how it was more often used as a tool of control and oppression than anything else).  And yet, even without the religious teachings in my mind, I found I still resonated with anti-capitalist movements.

I lived in LA when the Occupy movement happened.  I participated in bringing food and medical supplies to people and listening to how people were talking about money and economic systems.  Sadly too much of it was white-washed and skewed still in favor of white priviledge.

 

As I began the work of deconstructing white supremacy and decolonizing my mind (at that time I was in community with Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural learning from Indigenous elders in the community and guided by Trini and Luis Rodriguez.  In the very early season of my anti-racist education, I was deep in my fragility and shallow in my comprehension of white priviledge.  Somewhere during that season, I created a notion (no one told me this, my own mind came up with it) that in order to be a good anti-racist accomplice I needed to remain in a life of struggle.  Some twisted idea of penance I guess??  I don’t know, and I’m embarrassed to admit it here.

In fact I’m anxious about publishing a lot of what I’m writing here because it’s so vulnerable.  And yet, I write and share because I know the chances are high at least 1 other person on the planet has experienced at least some of this and I like bringing shame into the light so it has no power.

I am eternally grateful for the abundant patience, kindness, and tolerance those elders had with me in those early days…as they stuck with me as I thrashed about the beginning of my deconstruction process.  I am sure I was a frustrating student and yet they saw something in me worth sticking around for and continued to gently and firmly guide me in the direction of truth.

 

I continued to wrestle my mind between the reality of being exhausted by decades of financial struggle and wanting to be true to the work of anti-capitalism, justice, and equity.

For a long time I didn’t know how to reconcile those two pieces, or even if they could be reconciled.

I grappled with this as I opened up my own private practice in 2017 navigating what to charge clients for therapy as a complex trauma specialist.  I invested so much into getting where I was, and also it felt exploitative to charge so much when my clients were at absolutely rock bottom.

I donated thousands of hours of therapy in my desire to be accessible and equitable.

 

 

But here is a thing I have learned.  I’m not actually being financially accessible and equitable if I charge so little that I cannot pay my bills and my own life becomes inaccessible.

In the Summer of 2022

A dear friend of mine and Business Bestie, Jackie Schuld, ATR-BC, LPC has had many conversations with me about pricing our services.  She is an Autistic board certified art therapist with a private practice and writes extensively about building a practice that serves the therapist including pricing that is sustainable.  You can read her collection on practice-building on her Medium.

I have learned so much from Jackie around what it is to balance equity, justice, our own needs as humans who are Autistic, and building a pleasureable business; I’m so grateful she is one of my thought partners in business.

Jackie also introduced me to the book, We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers.  Rachel Rodgers is the founder of Hello 7, a multi-million dollar business that coaches other historically underresourced identities on how to build successful 7-figure businesses.  One of the first ways that Rachel’s approach blew my mind (there have been many) was when she speaks about how building wealth and doing justice work are NOT mutually exclusive.  And in fact, justice work takes a great deal of capital and if we who are most passionate about justice work have no capital, we cannot effect the kind of systemic-scale overhaul we need in the world.

That stopped me in my tracks right there.

Wait.  You mean, it’s ok for me to want to provide fully for myself–needs and wants–AND do justice work?!?!

What a radical notion!

My learning continued as I joined Kelly Diels‘ course, Copywriting for Culture Makers.  In this course, I have been learning so much about marketing from an intersectional feminist lens, about how money and justice work together, and about building ecosystems of accessibility and inclusion.  

The Journey Continues

I and my relationship with money are an ever-evolving thing.  I continue to learn, to weigh truths, to grapple with all the facets and I will continue to share points along this journey with you.

I think maybe I wrote this manifesta for myself, because maybe I needed to document myself giving myself permission to build and want an easeful life.  I’m giving myself permission to believe it is not an evil or greedy desire to have my needs and wants met and free up my brain to focus on how I can do my part to transform culture, rather than being constantly tied up with how to pay next month’s bills.

I’ve also realized this other piece about accessibility and equity, during the times when money has been more tight for me, it means that I have had to stop investing in people and projects that matter to me like Black and Indigenous artists, Black Lives Matter, Tia Chucha’s, and projects working to protect trans kids.  When I have an abundance of financial resources, I invest them back into what matters.

Statistics reflect this…when women, when gender expansive people, when Black, Indigenous and other people of the global majority, when disabled people, when queer people have money, we pour it back into lifting others up out of struggle.

That’s the biggest part of my dream, is wanting to build opportunities for other neurodivergent and disabled people to build THRIVING lives…not just barely surviving lives.

So, while I didn’t owe anyone the story of my journey or justification for the way I price my fees at this point in my journey, I value transparency and am grateful to anyone who took the time to read my money story.

 

What’s your money story?

Would you like a thought partner to work with you to process your money/pricing clutter?

Would you like to give yourself permission to charge more abundantly so you can thrive in your work?

5 Ways to Build Rejection Resilience for Entrepreneurs

Let’s do a little experiment.  You in?

Ok, I want you to notice what happens in your body, your mind, and your emotions when I ask this question:

How do you handle and respond to rejection?

What did you experience just then?  Were there particular memories that surfaced?  Any specific sensations in your body?  Did certain thoughts turn up the volume on their bullying?

At different points in my life I would have different answers for all of these questions.

Rejection is a part of entrepreneurship.  It just is.  And yeah, it doesn’t feel good at all.  And also, how we handle and respond to rejection is 1) able to be transformed, and 2) is a vital sign indicator for our ability to build sustainable entrepreneurship. 

In thinking about Building Rejection Resilience for this blog, I reflected on what experiences in life have helped me to build my Rejection Resilience.

One piece is that my entrepreneurship goes back decades…when I was an elementary school age kid, my cousin set up a lemonade stand in the front of her house by the sidewalk.  We brainstormed to use the little cardboard playhouse she had inside to bring attention and be our little serving window.  Then I thought, what if we offered cookies too?  And, as the crafty kids we were, what if we also sold hand-made bookmarks!?!  (Because who doesn’t need extra bookmarks).  That day we made $27 which for two kids in the 80’s was BANK!

Throughout my kid years I constantly had new ideas for businesses: hand-made stationery and note cards; hand-painted sweatshirts; babysitting.  Of those, only my babysitting business reallly took off (I was, after all, a Certified Red Cross babysitter at 13).  The sweatshirts were kind of a disaster and the note cards just became gifts for family members.

 

As I grew up, I launched so many ideas for businesses, programs, and solutions to problems in my community.  In my 30’s I got into writing and performing spoken-word poetry.

If you want a quick lesson in building rejection resilience, share your own poetry on a mic in front of a room full of other poets, artists, and activitists.  Oooof, some of those moments were really painful and uncomfortable.

Some of the feedback I received from people in writing spaces where I posted my work was harsh, and cut deep.

I began to submit my work to be considered for publication.  I got rejected a LOT.  And, I got published a lot.  I learned in the process that critiquing poetry is entirely subjective and where one editor may not like a piece, another editor might love it.

And so I began to learn that the rejection of a particular poem by a particular editor is not a universal truth about who I am as a person.

I did not understand that lesson over night.  It took so many submissions, rejections, acceptances, and personal mindset work.

I will absolutely be one of the first people to affirm that having someone reject, turn down, not purchase a program, offer, or product that we have poured heart and soul into creating, it hurts.

It is such a challenge to untangle our sense of worth with what we produce AND how people respond to that product.  Toxic capitalism teaches us to link our worthiness with the quality and quantity of what we produce.  So it makes sense that uncoupling these two things is challenging; we’re going against hundreds of years of culture.

 

Here’s an important truth I need you to know: one person’s response/reaction to what you have to offer is not a universal truth about who you are.

 

So, let’s look at 5 Ways to Build Rejection Resilience for Entrepreneurs

    • Keep putting your work out there
    • Adjust your mindset around your worthiness
    • Ask for feedback on what kept someone from buying, signing on, or registering for your creation
    • Keep putting your work out there
    • Practice growth mindset by reflecting on your programs, offerings, products and what is working about them and what needs recalibration
    • BONUS TIP: consider the source.  Is the critic, customer, random person on the internet truly a reliable and trustworthy source of feedback about what you have innovated and built?

Yep.  I sure did write “Keep putting your work out there” twice.  That was on purpose.  Because one of the ways we build resilience and flexibility is by doing the thing again and again.

At the time of writing this blog, my Expansive Mindset Coaching business is five months old.  I can’t even remember how many times I have updated my mission, how many programs I have tried out, how many reels I’ve posted, how many emails I’ve sent, but it’s been a lot.  I have no idea how to Instagram algorithm gods work, why one reel got over 3k views and another got 67 views.  But I keep putting my work out there because I know there are clients who need exactly who I am and how I coach.  Not everyone.  And that is ok.  It isn’t possible for me to coach everyone.  

So, back to the initial question: how do you handle/respond to rejection?  Are you ready to beef up your rejection resilience and take out all the nasty bullying beliefs that hold you back?  I’m so excited to do this work and can’t wait to talk to you!  Let’s set up a FREE 20min curiosity call today!

Boundaries as Liberation

The Unlimited Liberation of Boundaries

Often, when I talk with people about boundaries, the first thing that comes to mind is a limit. And to a degree, that is true. What is so exciting to me though is how creating limits with boundaries is actually liberating! Hence “Expansive Boundaries!”

Don’t just take my word for it though! In 2006 Landscape Architecture student Peter Summerlin, Associate ASLA, conducted a study that explored the impact of either having a fence or not having a fence around a children’s playground area. This is what Summerlin found:

It might seem contradictory for me to say that healthy boundary-making leads to liberation, and yet, When we know where the line is, we are free to explore, play, and create bravely!

Jennifer Alumbaugh, MS

A simple study was conducted to discover the effects of a fence around a playground and the consequent impact it would have on preschool children.  Teachers were to take their children to a local playground in which there was no fence during their normal recess hour.  The kids were to play as normal.  The same group was to be taken to a comparable playground in which there was a defined border designated by a fence.

 

In the first scenario, the children remained huddled around their teacher, fearful of leaving out of her sight.  The later scenario exhibited drastically different results, with the children feeling free to explore within the given boundaries.

 

The overwhelming conclusion was that with a given limitation, children felt safer to explore a playground.  Without a fence, the children were not able to see a given boundary or limit and thus were more reluctant to leave the caregiver.  With a boundary, in this case the fence, the children felt at ease to explore the space.  They were able to separate from the caregiver and continue to develop in their sense of self while still recognizing that they were in a safe environment within the limits of the fence.

 

Peter Summerlin, Associate ASLA, Research Abstract

As Adults, We’re Not that Different

Across the board, in every relationship I can imagine, healthy boundary making and affirming practices lead to liberation:

  • In the workplace with coworkers, supervisors, and directors
  • In the community with neighbors, friends, and organizations
  • In personal relationships around physical touch, intimacy, and play
  • In parenting
  • In relationships with relatives
  • In online conversations and comment threads
  • In watching the news and consuming content about the world around us

Learning and practicing ways to create strategic boundaries in all the different scenarios, settings, and relationships we have in life means that when we give our Yes! we do it authentically and with intention.

Want to Boost Your Boundary Practices?

If you’ve been wanting to strengthen your boundary-making muscles, I have THREE different opportunities for you to dive in!

If you’d like to talk with Jennifer about any of these or other opportunities click button to schedule a FREE 20min curiosity call.

Deconstruct False Narratives

The First Step to Solving a Problem, Is Naming the Problem

Dear Expansioneer,

Please receive this when I tell you:

YOU are NOT the problem.

You’re not.

I promise.

Cross my heart.

See, there are systems in place in our society that are designed specifically to make us fail, to make us feel small, to make us feel lazy, to make us feel less-than. This work is not about fixing “what’s broken inside you.” It’s about naming the systems that have caused harm and have indoctrinated their false narratives upon us.

This is step one.

And it can also be step 8.  And step 17.

Like the spiral in the center, we come back around to each practice multiple times in our journey, not to the exact same place, because we’re different. Many times we have new wisdom to mine once we’ve done the work needed to recognize that wisdom when we see it!

Once we’ve identified these bullying beliefs, we can get rid of them. They don’t actually belong to us so we don’t need to keep them around anymore. Some people call this a mindset shift.

Jennifer Alumbaugh, MS

Four Acts of Deconstructing False Narrative

  • Identify Bullying Beliefs
  • Reject and Release Imposed Identities
  • Dismantle Systemic Binaries
  • Find and Ground in your Truth

These are not mutually exclusive and in fact often interact and intersect with each other.

Let’s look at some examples of Bullying Beliefs:

  • “I’m not good enough”
  • “Ugh, I’m the worst, I didn’t get anything done today”
  • “I’m not smart enough”
  • “I feel like an imposter”
  • “I’m so lazy, I called in to work sick with Covid and all I did was lay around in bed all day”
  • “I’m a bad parent; I just got the kids fast food for dinner because I’m so exhausted”
  • “I’m such a mess, I can’t even keep up with the mail”

Any of these sound familiar? Have you ever had any of these thoughts?

 

 

I know I have!

These kinds of thoughts and beliefs about ourselves are not an accurate representation of who we are. They are part of the false narratives we are fed to believe by way of media, marketing, toxic religious messaging, toxic positivity, social media influencers, etc. And behind all of them is capitalism, and patriarchy, and racism, and white supremacy. Yeah. Those lying liars!

When I’m working with clients, part of my role is to hold up a mirror, a true mirror, so they can see their actual reflection…not those wobbly distortions of carnival fun house mirrors that the world shows us.

Once we’ve identified these bullying beliefs, we can get rid of them. They don’t actually belong to us so we don’t need to keep them around anymore. Some people call this a mindset shift.

 

One of my favorite exercises to do with clients is the Reject and Release Imposed Identities. There are so many ways that identities get put upon us without our consent–from gender to career to assumptions about our motives and decisions other people make about us as a result of their own imposed identities.

When a client stands up (literally and/or figuratively) and out loud rejects these parts that never belonged to them in the first place, I get chills. I get to witness and be in awe and that is one of the many reasons why I do what I do! It’s so empowering for clients to do this exercise, it invigorates the other parts of the work we do together.

Sometimes along with that or on it’s own, we Dismantle Systemic Binaries.

Now I know many people are used to hearing binaries associated only with gender, but binaries limit us across so many areas of life!

Good or bad.

Lazy or productive.

Happy or sad.

Calm or upset.

Woman or man.

Young or old.

In or out.

Cold or warm.

Either/ors are so very limiting. Too limiting for the magnificent complexity of the human experience! We are expansive beings who can be and feel and think and become so many glorious things all at once!

 

Our final step in Deconstructing False Narratives is to Find and Ground in Our Truth.

What does this mean, exactly?

Well kind of like in a remodel of a building, once all the old, rotted out, unreliable sections are gutted, the builder finds the beams that are true, that will hold weight, that will carry the rest of the building.

Similarly, once we have gotten rid of all the untrustworthy beliefs we’ve been schlepping around with us, we can finally see clearly what truth remains and is solid foundation for us to ground in.

So, “I’m so lazy,” becomes, “I honor my body’s need for rest.”

“I guess I’m a bitch because I said No,” becomes, “I advocate for myself with the boundaries I need to stay present”

“I’m a bad parent,” becomes, “When I get the kids take-out, I have more energy to play with them and do bedtime routine.”

This is what finding and grounding in our truth can look like. And when we continue our work from a place of being grounded in our truth, we have so much more agency, energy, and self-compassion moving forward.

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